Northern lifeline

It’s never easy flying in and out of Pangnirtung, Nunavut. The Inuit village on the east coast of Baffin Island sits on a coastal plain beside the steep peaks of Pangnirtung Fjord. To land here, aircraft such as First Air’s combi ATR 42 twin turboprop have to bank sharply on approach, before setting down on the village’s rough gravel runway.

This piloting job is tough enough when the weather is good. But when the weather gets bad in Canada’s North, it becomes extremely challenging. At Pangnirtung, and the other 30-odd northern communities that First Air serves, blizzard conditions and high winds can create blinding whiteouts at a moment’s notice. It is typical to go from a beautiful clear day to being socked right in, said Aaron Speer, First Air’s chief pilot. Even when the sky itself is clear, you can be about to touch down only to have the runways vanish in clouds of blowing snow.

Flying in Arctic weather conditions is just one of the challenges facing First Air pilots. The remoteness of the North means that navigational aids are few and far between, while land-based visual cues at night are mainly nonexistent, due to the absence of humans and their streetlights.

There’s basically no radar coverage up here, Speer said. Ninety per cent of the time, I am flying in uncontrolled airspace.

And then there’s the cold: park an aircraft on a windswept Arctic tarmac, and its engines will freeze solid unless they are kept warm by enveloping heated shrouds. Better make sure the engines don’t break down: aircraft on ground (AOG) support isn’t close at hand, as it is in southern Canada. Pilots and passengers could be stranded for days.

It is also vital to make sure that every single door and hatch is properly closed. Due to the extreme cold up here,

-30C or lower, the snow becomes super-fine crystals the size of sand, said Speer. It will get through the tiniest hole, piling up snowdrifts inside.

There are no jetways at gravel strip airports, either. Pilots and passengers must walk across the open tarmac to get to the plane. This is why Aaron Speer wears a big Canada Goose down-filled parka, snow pants, thick gloves and a balaclava when he’s outside. The priority is to minimize any exposed skin, to avoid frost bite, he said.

As for ground crews? At best, they are minimal. At worst, they are nonexistent, due to lack of infrastructure at most Arctic airports. Take de-icing, for example: at the smaller airports, First Air pilots and engineers have to do it themselves, using a portable de-icing fluid sprayer driven by a Honda generator.

To be a pilot in the North, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades willing to fly the plane, help passengers, move cargo, de-ice the aircraft, and anything else that needs to be done, Speer noted. Your job doesn’t stop once you leave the cockpit.

That said, First Air is a great place to work if you love to fly, given the variety of its fleet. Jet passengers are carried in four Boeing 737 all-passenger jets, and three 737-200 combis (passengers/freight combination). For smaller runways, First Air flies nine ATR 42s and two ATR 72 combis.

To achieve economies of scale for its service to larger centres, First Air operates a Boeing 767-223 Super Freighter. And, for those heavy hauling jobs where mining drills and dump trucks have to be flown in, the airline calls on its two L-382G Super Hercules aircraft.

We are the only civilian operator of Hercules aircraft in Canada, said Chris Ferris, First Air’s VP of sales and marketing. For many customers, we are the only way they can bring in heavy equipment in on a year-round basis.

That’s because most northern communities are not linked to the south by road, and ships only make it up here once or twice a year.

For the record, First Air has about 1,000 employees. Just over half are based at its Ottawa headquarters and other southern Canadian bases. The rest are spread across the North.

First Air is the operating name of Bradley Air Services Limited, which is based in suburban Ottawa. It is named for founder and aviation pioneer Russell Russ Bradley, an Ottawa aviator who opened a pilot training and flight school there in 1946. Bradley and fellow pilot Welland Weldy Phipps are known for pioneering the use of tundra tires, the oversized balloon tires, that, when fitted onto a small aircraft, allow it to land and take off safely from tundra-based airfields. This invention revolutionized northern air travel, making many more sites usable as ad hoc runways.

In 1958, Bradley Air Services won an important contract with the Geological Survey of Canada, flying personnel in and out of the North using Piper Super Cubs fitted with tundra tires. As the years progressed, the company’s expertise in northern flying won it more contracts.

By 1973, increased demand for passenger service led Bradley to form First Air, at which time the company established a maintenance base at Resolute Bay, Nunavut. Bases were later added at Iqaluit, Nunavut, and also in

Yellowknife, NWT, through the 1995 purchase of Ptarmigan Airways. (Bradley had previously purchased Survair’s Baffin Island operations and routes in 1978. It bought Northwest Territorial Airways in 1997.)

In its early days, First Air flew propeller-driven planes such as the Douglas C-47B, the de Havilland Canada DHC- 3 Otter and the DHC-6 Twin Otter. In 1986, the airline got its first jet aircraft, a Boeing 727-100C, which it reconfigured for combi operations.

Boeing 737 all-passenger service was started between Ottawa and Iqaluit in 2005, with the Boeing 767-223 Super Freighter coming online in 2009. (Its arrival allowed First Air to retire the two 727-200s it was flying at the time.) Finally, the airline finished phasing out its Hawker Siddeley HS748 twin turboprop aircraft in 2011, which it had been flying for 25 years. The HS748 has been replaced by ATR 42s and ATR 72s.

Although First Air remains headquartered in Ottawa, the company was purchased by the Makivik Corporation in

1990. Owned by the Inuit of Northern Quebec, Makivik was formed in 1975 to manage funds earned as a result of the James Bay Northern Quebec Land Claim Agreement, an Inuit land claim.

As an Inuit-owned airline, First Air plays an active role in fostering the community’s economic growth through programs such as Sivurariaqnik. This is an employment training program aimed at northern youth, directing them towards a range of jobs at First Air.

First Air’s business is split 50/50 between passenger and freight traffic, said Ferris. Annually, the airline carries anywhere from 200,000 to 225,000 passengers, both on north-south routes and flights between northern communities in Nunavik, Nunavut and the NWT.

We also haul about 24 million kilos of freight and 1.6 million kilos of mail a year, added Ferris.

Air travel is the link that keeps Canada’s northern infrastructure alive. The problem is the remoteness: Canada’s

North is not well connected to the south. In fact, most small northern communities have no road connections at all, beyond local streets in their immediate area. With the exception of the rail line that lies between Winnipeg and Churchill on Hudson’s Bay, there are no railways in Canada’s North. As for ships? Some can make it through in the summer, when the ice co-operates. That’s when truly large equipment and commodity shipments are brought in, on a once-a-year basis.

Such is the case with gasoline, which is stored locally in large tanks. When oil prices suddenly shot up a few years ago, some of the cheapest gas could be found in Iqaluit, said Aaron Speer. That’s because it had been purchased and delivered months before. We didn’t see the price jump until the next shipment of gas was delivered by ship.

In contrast to trucks, trains and ships, aircraft travel to Canada’s North throughout the year. What they carry represents everything a community needs to survive: people, food, clothing, tools, electronics, medical supplies, appliances, and every other essential of modern life.

When you bring someone up here to work, you also have to bring in everything they need to live, Speer said. Most of this has to come in by air, especially fresh food, medicines, and other perishable goods. And sometimes the cargo onboard can be a bit out of the ordinary: I’ve carried dog sled teams in my aircraft, he noted. Several dog sled teams, in fact.

As a company operating in the North, First Air has to deal with the high cost of doing business there. For instance, electricity costs about 70 cents a kilowatt/hour, as opposed to 20 cents down south, said Ferris. This is because all of the power has to be generated by diesels, using fuel that has to be brought in from the south.

In a bid to offset these costs, the airline has been moving to make its operations more efficient. This is why its two ATR 72s have cargo-handling systems that can work with palletized freight. Such systems make it easy to move pallets from 737s coming in from large urban centres, for distribution to smaller communities across the North by ATR aircraft.

To further increase the airline’s freight capacity to small communities, one of the First Air ATR 72s has been modified with a large cargo door. The door was installed over a 16-week period in Italy by Alenia Aermacchi. It further speeds up the transfer of pallets from First Air’s jet fleet to this aircraft, including the pallets carried by the airline’s 767 Super Freighter. The ATR 72 can fly a payload up to 15,800 pounds, in pure freight, combi, or up to 60-seat passenger configurations.

The ATR 42, in contrast, carries a 10,000-pound payload and a maximum passenger configuration of 42 seats.

In another move designed to improve efficiencies, First Air is reducing the number of aircraft types it operates. The company is no longer flying the Boeing 727 and Hawker Siddeley HS748, and intends to stick to the 737 platform for its large passenger/combi service.

We’d like to go to the next generation [of aircraft], but the cost looks prohibitive, said Ferris. So, we are moving next into the 737-400, which offers some advantages over the 737-200 in terms of fuel efficiency and maintenance costs.

Looking ahead, First Air will someday need to replace its two aging Hercules aircraft. The problem it faces is where to find such replacements. Finding older, used Hercules aircraft with a decent record is almost impossible, said Ferris. I think the decision we will have to confront is whether to move to a more modern platform; and if we do, how we will afford it.

Overall, Ferris sees fleet replacement as First Air’s next big challenge, as it tries to stay profitable in a slow economy. Added to the mix is increasing competition from southern-based airlines, including Air Canada and WestJet, which are also serving the busier Yellowknife route.

It is impossible to project any airline’s future, given the volatility of this industry. But certainly, First Air will continue to fight doggedly for market share, and to provide an aerial lifeline to Canada’s northern communities.

We’re kind of a cross between bush pilots and commercial carriers, with lots of challenges to keep it interesting, concluded Speer. As commercial flying goes, I’ve got a great job.

James Careless writes on aerospace issues for Canadian Skies, Vertical, Rotorhub and Aviation Maintenance magazines. He is a two-time winner of the PBI Media Award for Editorial Excellence.